Philip Wallach’s lead essay extends his analysis in other notable writings on Congress, especially his wonderful book Why Congress and his National Affairs article “Congress Indispensable.” His analysis is characteristic of his other essays on Congress: both ambitious and nuanced, historically informed, and relevant to the critical problem our republic currently faces.
After briefly summarizing what is novel and important about Wallach’s argument about Congress, my response poses a few questions about Wallach’s framework for analyzing the branch. First, I ponder how extensive the so-called “Secret Congress” is, and whether its existence complicates the standard account of congressional irrelevance. I then question whether Wallach’s goal of weakening partisan loyalty and enabling cross-cutting policymaking would actually revive Congress. Finally, taking Wallach’s side on those questions in spite of my hesitations, I suggest some specific (albeit radical) reforms that might advance the kind of Congress Wallach seems to envision.
Why Congress Is Indispensable
One of Wallach’s key insights and arguments over the years, also advanced in his lead essay, is that Congress is the only institution in our system that reflects the diversity of our extended republic and allows our different interests and opinions to confront each other, deliberate, bargain, and compromise towards durable solutions to the nation’s major challenges. As he puts it, he wants Congress to engage in “the kind of broad coalition-building needed if policy investments are to endure for generations.” Those durable policy investments tend to produce greater peace and trust among citizens who disagree with each other, because they tend to settle big questions on a relatively permanent basis—think the Civil War Amendments, the New Deal, the Great Society, and Civil Rights legislation.
The key problem he confronts in his essay is Congress’s passivity and irrelevance, a problem that leads to narrow coalition-building and winner-take-all presidential elections. That style of politics fails to generate durable policy investments and tends to result in policymaking by executive orders—orders which are frequently reversed in four or eight years by a new president with a similarly narrow majority.
Congress is creeping towards the decrepitude that Wallach foresaw as a possibility in his latest book. In part, it is on this path because it is a clunky, inefficient body with many different voices, operating in an age that demands managerial efficiency. But as Wallach has argued, Congress’s “inefficiencies” are actually the very virtues that our republic most needs. Its plurality and inefficiency promote compromise, trust, and accountability, if it serves the role our Framers intended for it.
The Extent of “Secret Congress”?
One big question Wallach hints at, but does not fully address, is just how far Congress has actually gone down the path of decrepitude. The overall tone of his essay suggests that Congress has become irrelevant. But periodically, he acknowledges that Congress still matters, more so than people today think it does. He writes, for example, that Congress’s “irrelevance is now probably overestimated by most casual observers of American politics.” He notes that Congress’s factions did play a significant role in crafting various provisions of the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Even in foreign policy, where the president has traditionally been more of a forceful actor, members on relevant congressional committees are able to “steer presidential conduct” to a degree.
These statements depict a Congress that still determines policy outcomes, where committees still matter, and where bipartisanship still exists on lower-salience issues. They resemble the writing on the so-called “Secret Congress.” In my experience, teaching various undergraduate and graduate students with experience on Capitol Hill, this version of Congress is more prevalent than people think. Vitriol and drama are good for media consumption, but still, much of the real work of legislating is happening in committees, across the aisle, on low-salience issues. It just goes largely unnoticed.
Case in point: the GENIUS Act, the first major legislation on cryptocurrency in the United States, recently passed with over 300 votes in the House and 68 votes in the Senate. While President Trump was generally supportive of the bill, most of it was hashed out by legislators and their staff. In short, I think our picture of Congress’s irrelevance would be clarified significantly if we could get a handle on how much of this kind of activity still happens in Congress today, and how much it actually matters in comparison to the soap-opera performances that tend to get the most media attention.
Cross-Cutting Policies vs. Partisan Loyalty
But set that question aside for the sake of the argument and assume that Congress is perilously far down the road to decrepitude or irrelevance, which I take to be Wallach’s central point. Wallach writes that it would take “some shock to the system, big enough to make members prioritize politically cross-cutting policies rather than partisan loyalty.”
My interpretation of this statement is that Wallach wants members to follow local constituencies, which tend to be rooted in interest, more than they follow national partisan identities, which tend to be more ideologically rooted. Historically, the tension between these two views of representation has driven congressional development. If members were to be freed up from their parties, it seems that they would necessarily have to become more closely tied to local constituents who re-elect them. Similar to the bipartisan and decentralized Congress of the mid-twentieth century, members would be defined not by their party brand but by their locality.
My main concern is that this would exacerbate Congress’s weakness rather than alleviate it. Historically, decentralized structures and procedures such as open amendment processes, leadership shorn of committee assignment and agenda control powers, and powerful committees, have tended to fragment Congress and render its collective action more difficult. As James Curry and Frances Lee have recently explained, today’s centralized procedures are the means by which Congress has remained active, given the nature of the political environment, rather than contributing to its irrelevance.
I’m interested to know why Wallach would expect this time to be different. In other words, even if we freed members from their national parties and enabled them to prioritize cross-cutting policies, would bipartisanship flourish again? Would that, in turn, lead to a more assertive and relevant Congress? I’m not so sure.
The expansion of national authority over the past century has made our political contests more acrimonious because more is at stake.
Wallach acknowledges that the external environment, rather than its internal structure, plays a critical causal role in Congress’s irrelevance. He speculates, “perhaps [decrepitude] is inevitable in a historical moment when more Americans see their political adversaries as actual enemies unworthy of being political bedfellows on any cause. Why should one seek to persuade and accommodate people who wish to destroy one’s whole way of life? If we do not believe in reasoning together, there is no need for Congress to make a comeback as an institution.” In other words, Wallach seems to understand that Congress’s current polarization and centralization are symptoms, not causes. They are effects of the way the American people think about engaging in politics with each other. Reducing partisan loyalty and incentivizing cross-cutting policies may simply be out of touch with the mood of the people, and perhaps no amount of institutional reform within Congress can change that.
Reforms to Unleash Cross-Cutting Coalitions
One response to my skepticism might be that Americans seem to be more divided today than they actually are, because of distortions in the way public opinion is shaped and understood by members of Congress and others inside the beltway. The loudest voices tend to be the most amplified on social media, and those tend to be on the extremes. Those who furnish contributions to campaigns also tend to come from the extremes, and they tend to have the ears of the members. Wallach’s proposal for weakening partisan loyalty and unleashing cross-cutting policy coalitions, it might be argued, would put members more in touch with the more numerous and more moderate (if quieter) constituents that they should be representing.
I’m sympathetic to this view. But this leads to the question: how to get members to better represent them? What kinds of institutional reforms would help to strengthen members’ attachments to their constituents on the ground, and advocate for their interests as opposed to following orders from congressional leaders—thus leading to the more bipartisan and more assertive Congress for which Wallach hopes?
I think the necessary reforms would be quite radical, and I would be interested in whether Wallach shares this view. These radical reforms for conserving Congress should be openly avowed and defended. Here are some possibilities that might support Wallach’s project:
- Dramatic expansion of the House of Representatives: Members today represent around 750,000 constituents. If that number were reduced to a ratio of 1:250,000, members would be closer to their constituents, and presumably more able to buck party leadership and still win reelection in their home districts.
- Abolish the direct primary: The direct primary was originally justified as a means of ensuring that candidates would be accountable to local communities. Paradoxically, primaries are today a chief means of nationalizing candidate behavior. One of the key ways in which presidents have dominated their parties in the past century, from FDR’s purge campaign in 1938 to Trump’s threat to oust Republican Thomas Massie, is the intervention in primary elections. Presidential interventions tend to nationalize campaigns. Moreover, in today’s era of partisan sorting into deep-red and deep-blue districts, primaries also incentivize members to avoid compromise and moderation.
- Overhaul campaign finance: House and Senate races are often nationalized because so much of the money spent on advertising comes from outside the districts. These advertisements highlight national issues over local issues and arguably give people outside of congressional districts a greater voice than the voters within them. Party leadership PACs give congressional leaders leverage over rank-and-file members who are reliant on those dollars for reelection.
- Abolish the presidential veto on policy matters: In an era of tight majorities, mustering a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress is extremely heavy lifting. It was once a key plank of the Whig Party platform that their presidents would not use the veto to advance a policy agenda. Instead, the veto would be limited to measures that violated the Constitution. Presidents today, paradoxically, sign legislation that they object to on constitutional grounds, and veto (or threaten to veto) legislation on policy grounds. If Congress could legislate without the threat of a presidential veto, it could be much more assertive than it is today.
- Revive the legislative veto: Until the Court’s monumental decision in INS v. Chadha, Congress delegated power but retained the ability to reverse administrative decisions without requiring the president’s signature. The Court did away with hundreds of these legislative veto provisions in Chadha, and this has certainly correlated with Congress’s decline and the emergence of presidentialism. I think that Chadha was wrongly decided and should be reversed, but whether Wallach agrees with me or not, I wonder whether he would support a constitutional amendment to revive the legislative veto.
The Challenge of Political Nationalization
One additional reform to our political system as a whole might be more effective than any of these in restoring a functional and effective Congress. Our system was not designed to solve all policy problems at the national level, one-size-fits-all. Our ability to compromise and to live peaceably with each other was probably a result, at least partially, of the fact that the stakes of national policy were lower throughout most of American history. The expansion of national authority over the past century has made our political contests more acrimonious because more is at stake.
It may be too late, and perhaps inadvisable, to return to the balance of state and federal authority that existed for most of American history. But either way, we should acknowledge that the centralization of power has put strain on the political system’s ability to manage conflict and generate durable coalitions, and that Congress has been the institution most dramatically affected by the consolidation of power in the hands of the national government. None other than James Madison himself understood this problem—as early as 1791.
This doesn’t mean we should stop looking for solutions to the problem of congressional irrelevance. To the contrary: conserving and reviving Congress is the most critical challenge of twenty-first-century American politics. But it should clarify the scope of the challenges Congress faces and encourage us to advance reforms that are sufficient to meet those challenges. Wallach has laid the groundwork for these reforms in his lead essay, and I hope he takes the next step and sketches a path to conserve or return to congressional relevance.
